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PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK

Six men watching Ireland beat Italy at football were shot dead by 'Loyalist' terror- ists in a bar in Loughinisland, Co. Antrim; they were all Catholics, though the bar was also used by Protestants. The murders fol- lowed those of two Catholics and two Protestants in Northern Ireland in four shootings last week. A man sprayed A-level students with a home-made flame-thrower in Holywood, Belfast, badly burning three boys; this seemed not to be a terrorist attack, the supposed perpetrator being an obvious madman. The Royal Air Force will suffer most from the cuts proposed in the `Frontline First' defence cuts, which will trim 20,000 jobs. The Treasury and the Ministry of Defence tussled over £1,000- million-worth of savings which the one wanted to put in the common purse and the other wanted to invest in weapons. Mr Michael Heseltine resisted efforts to make him chairman of the Conservative Party. The Duke of Norfolk said in a Lords debate that homosexual acts were unnatu- ral, 'which is confirmed by the construction of the parts of the body involved'; neverthe- less a Commons decision to lower the age of consent to 18 was carried by 176 to 113. Mr Peter Lilley, the Social Security Secre- tary, said that unmarried women had babies because so many young men weren't worth

marrying. Mrs Peter Bottom ley, the Health Secretary, announced reductions in the number of hospital beds. There was anoth- er one-day train strike; the Government hovered on the edge of intervening, while Railtrack, the employers, admitted that a quarter of signalmen would receive a cut in pay under its current offer. The BBC began television transmissions in Arabic to the Middle East. The FT-SE share index plunged below 3,000. The Fifth Form at St Mary's, Wantage, a girls' school, was sus- pended for running riot; ten boys at Ample- forth were suspended for drug-taking. An idiotic young man ran into the path of the filly Papago during the Ribblesdale stakes at Ascot but escaped with his life. Wimble- don began with rain and a controversy over Andre Agassi's shaving of his legs; the women's number-one seed, Steffi Graff, was knocked out in the first round by Lori McNeil. Joan Kruse, the elephant trainer and bareback rider died, aged 63.

MR BOUTROS Boutros Ghali, the secre- tary-general of the United Nations, asked the UN Security Council to approve a plan by France to send some of her troops to Rwanda in the hope of stopping some of the massacres there; the Rwandan Patriotic Front advanced on the capital, Kigali. Eth-

nic cleansing by Serb forces in northern Bosnia continued despite a supposed cease- fire. The horrors of civil war increased in Angola; there were heavy civilian casualties in Quito. The nomadic Turkana people of northern Kenya continued to be picked off by cattle-raiders from Sudan and the Pokot tribe in Kenya. Northern forces in Yemen kept up the bombardment of Aden. Kim 11 Sung, the North Korean dictator, proposed a summit meeting with members of the Southern government. Mr Yitzhak Rabin, the Prime Minister of Israel, said he would be willing at any time to hold talks with King Hussein of Jordan. Twenty-five peo- ple were killed by a bomb at the tomb of the eighth Imam Reza in Mashhad, reputed to be Iran's holiest shrine. Russia signed a `Partnership for Peace' agreement with Nato. A gunman opened fire at a military hospital near Spokane in Washington state, killing four before being shot dead. A car- toon film called The Lion King swept Amer- ica and is expected to affect Britain shortly. The dollar fell to its lowest against the yen since the second world war, despite inter- vention by the Bank of Japan. The Italian government called upon its citizens to have more babies. The first of July will be delayed by a second to keep in step with